Sometimes I wonder if I care too much about this tech shit and whether it's all out of my hands. I don't know. It feels when I write the newsletter and do the podcast like I exist in another reality to people saying AGI is imminent. It's discouraging and frustrating. I won't stop, though
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The AGI proponents live in delusion. The systems that are being built as they are can never do that. I feel like they are all banking on it just springing into existence on its own.
It’s a good fight Ed, love the podcast and newsletter.
It matters. The amount of scamming and fear mongering to enable the scamming is real and my credibility to push back against it among lay people is limited.
The world where "AGI" was built is the one where OpenAI didn't rush out the release of a subpar chatbot and start an unwinnable race.
In that other world Demis and other serious researchers' work stayed in labs for another decade and LLMs never entered the public lexicon.
Whenever somebody tells me that an LLM improved their writing, it doesn't raise my opinion of LLMs. It lowers my opinion of their writing.
That’s just where we are now.
Seems like one of those things that'd get you tortured for wasting time or whatever.
FWIW this reminds me of Windows NT in 1994, and the 1999 dot com boom. A little like the crypto/block chain/NFT thing of a few years ago. LLMs are a bit more real than NFTs.
Keep explaining it to others
These algorithms are so bad at anything beyond the most restricted datasets focused on a single topic
AGI as a concept is laughably bad, it's not gonna happen anytime soon if ever
But ppl refuse to hear it
As a Windows users, they constantly fuck up my UX. It's been largely the same for 2 decades, and now they just keep tweaking the dumbest shit and adding friction. It's a nightmare.
The tech world can do better and you know it. So imo you don't care too much, and what you do is important as hell. Thank you Ed.
Do what you need to do to refuel, and keep going. It’s important.
Or explained that writing a paragraph to tell a robot to select a segment isn't fun - just more work.
Nice to have a high profile voice expressing this frustration better than I ever could.
Maybe we need a #techtakedown
“[AI is] just a marketing term for a slightly updated version of the automation that has been ruling our lives for years.”
That take only makes sense from a person who doesn’t understand computers beyond “magic box that helps me”.
So, I know exactly how you feel.
But I ain't stopping either.
You're not going to convince falsehood's handmaidens, but you are weakening them with every episode.
The issues with Claude Plays Pokemon are interesting from an academic perspective but otherwise the tricks it uses to play the game are not how LLMs are used and Anthropic aren't pushing it as AGI, it's more just for fun.
We don’t even have AI that matches the autonomous intelligence of ants.
If they were, they'd be very uninterested in all this money because the level of hyperinflation caused by superautomation is going to make money worthless. And owning mines will be pointless because AGI will rightfully eminent domain it all.
So if they really believed AGI was imminent they'd all treat money like it doesn't matter, conceptually, and trade it for what does - healthcare to ensure as many people as possible see AGI.
CEOs and people who don't want to put in the effort _want_ AGI to be imminent, but that doesn't make it true.
The Bluesky algorithm bumped me into you. Thank you blue sky for finding me a new podcast.
you're the guy whose name pops up whenever Prabhakar Raghavan googles himself, and it ruins his day every time 😂
and you're the guy who went to Lisbon with a slide deck and called these SV celebs "shitheads" 🤣
that's what endeared you to my stubborn USMC brother
Words have POWER. Yours are the disinfecting sunlight on the cockroaches of the industry. 🤘
More here… https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/03/14/holodick
before I'd landed on one of EZ's rants a year ago, the best I could figure was a spidey-sense tingle, like "vibes are off, idk man"
shit all makes more sense now, with all this context and data and Im6so glad I stumbled upon it
The AI people are the same. It's all film flam artists.
"It still bothered her that humans once thought programs that mathematically predicted the next word or pixel of an image constituted ‘artificial intelligence.’"
When there's no more money left to throw on the burn pile, grifters will move on to the next grift.